Pumpkin by Icing, and black shatter

A few days ago I showed you an amazing orange glitter with superfantastical bling-o-rama going on here.
This is the same colour, with OPI Black Shatter on top. I was going for something sort of Halloween-ish with the black and orange, and I guess it's ok, but it's a shame to cover up the amazing glitter. I dabbed the shatter polish on and swiped it back and forth across the nail instead of the typical swiping motion used to apply polish. This causes the polish to shatter in a more random pattern. You can apply shatter in all different ways to achieve a different look. No matter how you do it, you  just have to be fast, and try not to go over the same spot twice.

Here is a pic of it before I applied the top coat. It makes it look a little charred, which I guess is appropriate for Halloween.

Thanks for looking!

♥pam♥

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OPI Espresso Your Style, and Gold Shatter

Good Morning lovely readers! I have been thinking of all of you that may have been affected in one way or another by hurricane Irene. I hope this finds you well and safe and relatively dry. I do not live in a hurricane zone, and we have had really good weather. It's hard to imagine that while skies are blue here, there is an angry storm to the East unleashing her fury on innocent people. I expect we will see the tail end of it here with a few days of rain by the weekend. We are relatively unaffected by most natural disasters in this area, although this year has brought more tornadoes, and hail than I have ever seen in my life, and we have felt two earthquakes as well. By 'feel' I mean I could feel my couch swaying and see my bird feeder swinging. In no way were we ever at risk of any damage here at all. If I had not been sitting still chances are I would not have felt it at all. I really feel for all of you who deal with unsettled Earth on a regular basis.

I swatched OPI Espresso Your Style for a friend of mine, so I decided to show you as well. It is a beautiful rich deep warm brown with a lovely gold shimmer/microglitter. This was three coats, but I admit I was in a bit of a hurry so if I had been more careful I might have been able to get away with two.

 Espresso Your Style was originally released in the Kick up Your Heels collection in 2006, which I believe was a black label. Mine is from the re-release and is a green label.

This was taken outside.

I decided to throw my new OPI Gold Shatter over top just for fun.

Gold Shatter is pretty, and I can't wait to try it over other colours. It didn't shatter well here so I will have to experiment with it over completely dry polish vs slightly tacky polish.

Thanks for looking!

♥pam♥

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China Glaze Metro Collection- Westside Warrior, Midtown Magic and Concrete Catwalk

I was very excited to see the new fall 2011Metro Collection by China Glaze out at the beauty supply!! I only picked up three, but wow am I impressed! I may go back for more. The formula on all three is exceptional. Smooth and highly pigmented. They are almost one coaters.

*EDIT* I  picked up a few more and you can find that post here

This is Concrete Catwalk. Dark grey. Gorgeous. Smooth. Love.

Concrete Catwalk with Heartbreaker by Pure Ice on top. I love Heartbreaker so much. It just makes everything magical.

Here we have Midtown Magic, and it is just that. Magic. It is a gorgeous deep red-based brown with gold and red micro-shimmer. It is sort of a warmer version of Color Club With Abandon, but it has WAY better application. Below is a comparison.

With Abandon is a cooler more ashy black based colour, and Midtown Magic is warm brown. 

Midtown Magic again, with top coat.

The shimmer is just gorgeous!

Westside Warrior is a khaki green. Slightly yellow based, but not so much that it makes my hands look red.

Perfect colour for a camouflage design mani.

This is in the direct sunlight.

China Glaze Westside Warrior with Tarnished Gold crackle on top, and top coat.

Here I topped Westside Warrior with Sally Hansen Hidden Treasure on the pinky and ring fingers, and Orly Amp'd on the middle and index fingers.

And lastly I tried Fairy Dust by China Glaze over Concrete Catwalk. It was ok, but not my favourite. CC it fabulous all on its own.

This collection gets an A+ from me, although I am not ready to wear fall colours yet. :)

thanks for looking.

♥pam♥

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Canada Day Nail Art

Well, better late than never right? I was on vacation during the holidays and I didn't have access to the internet to post my Canada Day nail art. So here it is. :) I wanted to do art, and I wanted to use crackle polish since I had it in both red and white. Being a Libra I couldn't decide, so I decided to do both.

HAPPY CANADA DAY!!!

I started off with alternating white and red polish.

 I used Sinful for the white and China Glaze Phat Santa for the red.

Then I added a coat of OPI Red Shatter on the pinky, a swipe of OPI White Shatter and dots in Sinful white on the ring finger, and I used China Glaze Phat Santa to make the heart and the borders to look like a Canadian flag on my middle finger, and Sinful White to make the dots on my index finger with a Konad Plate.

I hope you enjoyed this, even though it is a little late.

Thanks for looking.

♥pam♥

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Color Club What a Shock! Under OPI Blue Shatter

I have really been feelin' the crack lately.
Umm....errr... you know what I mean.
Crackle and Shatter finishes have been very popular this year so far, and more and more are being released.
Today I have Blue Shatter by OPI. It's a very bright blue with a shimmer, but not as much shimmer as the Silver Shatter which is almost a metallic. One of my favourite colour combinations is blue and lime green, so I went with that today.

This is the finished look.

First I applied two coats of Color Club What a Shock! For whatever reason it applied better today than usual. I did use OPI ridge filler as a base, so perhaps that's why? It still had a little bit of cuticle drag but not bad and I was able to get away with two coats.

Then I applied a coat of Seche Vite because with most crackle/shatter polishes you must apply over DRY nail polish. (with the exception of Silver Shatter which seems to crack better over fairly wet polish)

and this is with the blue shatter on top

So summery and bright.

I topped it all off with a thin coat of  Vivid by Color Club. Most shatter polish dries fairly matte, and in my opinion looks nicer with top coat. Plus it flakes off quite easily with out t/c and the bumpier texture of shatters is smoothed out with t/c as well.

Thanks for looking!

Feel free to leave me a message if you have any requests or questions.

♥Pam

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OPI Navy Shatter over Orly Gumdrop

Hello lovely readers. All two of you at this point..hehe. That's ok. I hope there are more people reading that don't follow.  I love blogging even just for myself :) It's been really fun so far, and I feel all creative.

This past weekend we spent a few days at our cottage, which happens to be on a beach. So I wanted something beachy and aqua-like. Especially since we are trying to come up with new paint schemes at the cottage which will be aqua themed as well. I just got OPI Navy Shatter, and I love turquoise and navy blue together so this is what I came up with.

It was easy to apply, and is quite opaque. I tried it over several blues and greens and they all looked great.

Hope you like it!

Thanks for looking.

~Pam

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Pirates of the Caribbean skittles, and with silver shatter

As soon as I got my PotC collection in I knew I had to try them. But which one first?!?! ahh the dilemma. So I decided to do a skittle mani of my fav colours from the collection. 

I really liked these. So soft and creamy looking. For me the application wasn't the easiest, but it was worth it. I do kinda love them.

And of course I had to throw Silver Shatter over top.

Even more love. ♥

I did not have any trouble with Silver Shatter, but I have heard of others having issues with it not cracking well. The solution seems to  be to apply Silver Shatter over fairly wet polish rather than the usual shatter over dry polish rule.

Let me know what your experience with this is?

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Colourful gradient under shatter

Here is another favourite way of mine to wear black shatter. I get so many compliments when I wear it like this. The 'gradient' isn't really a gradient but rather three lines-but the shatter over top really pulls it together and makes it look like a gradient. It's fun and easy and works with a lot of different colours.

For this one I used a yellow base just to make the colours really pop, then did a line of pink and orange. Then came a coat of Seche Vite just because I didn't want to wait for the polish to dry (it's best if you apply shatter polish over dry nail polish)  before applying OPI Black Shatter.

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Crackle-ackle-ackle

I wasn't completely sold on the crackle/shatter concept at first, but since I tried it I absolutely love it. For me personally it is all about colour combos. I picked up OPI black shatter first, and now I am the proud owner of several other shades and brands of shatters. The combos are endless.
Here is one of the first shatter/crackle mani's I ever did.

This is Orly Glitz, and China Glaze Broken Hearted.

My application and photo skills could have been better, but I was just trying out different colour combos, and I did like this one.

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